


A Thousand Words

by Hectopascal



Series: Blackout Kink Bingo [1]
Category: Saga of Darren Shan - Darren Shan
Genre: Darren has issues, Darren stop being to darn adorable, M/M, Minors, PWP, Steve Has Issues, Steve put the Sharpie away, Underage - Freeform, Writing on the Body, but still a happy ending, but they're less serious, for y'know pwp, this is not how normal people engage in sexual intercourse, what is wrong with this picture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 20:26:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hectopascal/pseuds/Hectopascal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first square of my kink bingo card -- writing on the body. Steve and Darren and a Sharpie. That is all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thousand Words

See, the thing was Steve had never actually scared Darren, not really, not even when he got crazy mad and screamed at everyone in sight for something that may or may not have been their fault. So when Steve showed up at his house one day while Darren’s parents and little sister were at a skating rink and said:

“Let’s fuck.”

Darren’s first reaction was to shrug and say:

“Okay,” followed by, “do you know how?”

Of course Steve knew how because Steve knew everything about anything important and Darren knew that, so there was really nothing to worry about. After Steve had given him the basics in a rush (“In my _butt_ , are you sure?” “Yes, yes, I’m sure, now move that ass.”), shoving him up the stairs the whole time, Darren had found himself on his bed blinking up at Steve while his best friend tore manically at his shirt.

Darren thought it was a Wednesday. Wednesdays with Steve were always so interesting.

Steve’s hands fumbled at his belt and he shot a look at Darren, “What are you doing? Take your clothes off.”

“Err,” Darren said eloquently, “Why am I doing that again?”

“So we can fuck, stupid.” Steve said in the tone he got sometimes when one of their teachers was being particularly dense.

“I’m not stupid,” Darren protested. “You just didn’t say why –”

Steve groaned, “Do I havta spell everything out for you?”

Darren considered this for a moment and shrugged, “I guess not.”

“Good.”

Steve kicked his pants aside, making clear the fact that he was not wearing underwear, and jumped on the bed next to Darren like getting his friend in the nude was his newest, most fulfilling life goal.

“C’mon, hurry up slow poke.”

“All right, all right, already, geez.” In no time at all, Darren was as naked as Steve – his pants and boxers tossed to the floor, his shirt (by some happy chance of fate) was hanging rather despondently from a lamp shade, and his socks had vanished seemingly through sheer willpower.

Steve rocked back on his heels to survey his handiwork and a look of intense satisfaction crossed his face in the guise of a predatory smirk and brightly narrowed eyes. Darren licked his lips (they had gone dry all of a sudden) and then thought that maybe he shouldn’t have when Steve zeroed in the movement.

“Okay,” Steve muttered and Darren was really rather chill with the whole idea that this thing was happening at this point so it didn’t bother him a bit when Steve leaned over him, shoving his skinny chest in Darren’s face, to grope for something just out of reach on the floor. 

“Okay,” Steve huffed again and came back into view, still naked, still totally unashamed, with his prize grasped in his fist. It was familiar, one of many similar such items that could be found in complete disarray around both of their rooms. It was…a black Sharpie marker.

Darren raised his eyebrows. This didn’t seem typical judging from the Cliff Notes rundown he’d gotten, but then it wouldn’t be the first time Steve had accidentally left something important out of an explanation for those lesser mortals.

Steve uncapped the Sharpie with a sharp jerk and stared down at Darren, an unholy gleam sliding into his eyes. He shoved Darren flat with a hand on his shoulder and then he straddled Darren’s hips, smiled in a quite disturbing fashion, bent over, and began to write.

Literally. Write. On his skin.

With a permanent marker.

Darren craned his neck forward at an awkward angle that made it kind of hard to swallow to spit pooling in his mouth and squawked, “What are you _doing_?”

Steve pushed his head back down against the mattress and kept writing, moving the tip across Darren’s shoulder, dipping down into the area above his collarbone, and back up onto his other shoulder.

“What does it look like?” he said, and this time the _idiot_ was implied.

Darren let out a frustrated huff of air and gave up. It wasn’t like he knew what was going on before Steve had decided to initiate Craft Time, so he adopted his usual attitude when dealing with Steve’s many nuances – he went with the flow of it and waited to see where it would lead.

Steve hummed in approval and the tip of his tongue tucked into the side of his mouth as he frowned in concentration. As Darren lay there passively he became aware of several facts.

One, the tip of the Sharpie was just a little sharp and it kind of hurt when Steve pressed down hard (which was always and often).

Two, the ink from the tip of the Sharpie was wet and also cold and sent mixed signals to his brain, making it difficult to accurately classify the sensation as pleasant or not.

Three, Steve was apparently serious about Darren not moving, pinching his arm when he fidgeted, which also fell into the ambiguous category of feelings.

Four, his lower ribs were really ticklish.

Five, Steve in savant mode was marginally more frustrating than Steve in idiot mode in that he ignored Darren with both perfect serenity and confidence.

Six…hm, six was, well…being completely at someone else’s mercy was a little, to use one of Steve’s words, kind of _hot_.

The marker made its merry way in a twitching circle of script around one of Darren’s stiff nipples, hardened first by cold and then by other things, in a narrow paragraph down his stomach, in a quick jolt on the side of his pelvis, and a brief series of phrases between his hips. Steve held him down the whole while, his hand growing warmer each time it shifted to press against a new area, as Steve laid claim to whatever he saw fit.

A crushing grip on his fingers ground bone together as words crawled across his wrist and up his arm, like the march of a thousand tiny spiders each with legs that pricked and pulled.

Darren stared up at his ceiling and thought about putting a couple movie posters up there. It really wasn’t all that interesting to watch the shadows flit ever so slowly against the whitewashed ceiling and the electric light bulbs blurred his vision and made everything all spotty if he watched the filament for too long.

After some time Steve stopped. He was totally still, Sharpie not quite touching Darren’s skin, not blinking, barely breathing, for a long moment. Then he shook his head as if he had to physically shake the fit off, tossed the Sharpie to the side without caring where it fell, and grinned madly.

“We’re good.”

Darren blinked and forced himself to look at Steve’s face instead of his body for the sake of his mental health. “Are we?”

“Yep,” Steve nodded decisively, “I don’t suppose you have any –” he made a tugging motion with one hand, “for when you, y’know?”

“Um,” Darren said.

“Right,” Steve snorted, “of course not. Good thing I came prepared.” He leaned off the bed, giving a small grunt as he rummaged around among the folds of fabric on the floor.  Darren heard a rustle, Steve say a word that would have gotten him suspended from school if any of their teachers heard it, and then Steve popped back up, a bottle of lotion held triumphantly aloft.

“What’s that for?” Darren asked.

Steve grinned.

“I’ll show you.”

And he did.

Darren would never have a clear memory of what happened next, just snapshots that stood out in vivid color amongst everything else instead of the roll of film he thought it should be. One was of the contraction inside his chest, the struggle to breathe through a mouthful of fabric, the sensation as unforgettable as his blood boiling in his veins because it was all so new and _it_ _never_ _felt_ _that way_ _before, god, why_ _does_ _it_ _feel_ _like_ _that_?

One of Steve snarling, low and dangerous, in his ear that Darren needed to _stop_ _thinking_ , _for_ _fuck’s_ _sake_ and the twist of a feeling in his stomach that wasn’t quite pleasure and wasn’t quite fear, but a combination of the two, better than either apart and infinitely more potent.

His head swam and Darren had to consider the very real possibility that he had been inexplicitly transported to Everest or some mountain summit equally high above the clouds in a flash of ionic energy by one of those old Star Trek beams before he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be thinking and _geez_ , _how_ _did_ _Steve_ _even_ do _that_ _with_ _his_ _tongue_?

Then one of the wrench in his shoulder, Steve pulling his arm in a way it was most definitely _not_ supposed to bend, the burst of stars when Darren’s head cracked against the headboard (“Sorry, Darren, sorry.”), the burn of _something_ , something stretching his insides, ripping him apart and then putting him back together not missing a single inconsequential piece.

Darren always forgot a piece when he was assembling those Do-It-Yourself robots; he was so forgetful even with the instructions and labeled diagrams with helpful arrows staring him right in the face. Steve never forgot anything when he put his mind to it. Steve was just fantastic at that kind of thing – it was one of the things Darren admired about him.

One of Steve spewing absolute filth that would have gotten him _deported_ for saying it within a teacher’s earshot, forget suspension and expulsion, and Darren couldn’t have repeated a word of it without going red as a tomato, it was that bad.

Steve seemed to take particular delight in watching Darren physically squirm from the language, stroking him with short jerks every other word until blood rushed from Darren’s brain at the very sight of Steve opening his mouth (Later Darren would find out about Pavlovian conditioning and marvel over the simplicity of it, but then it just seemed to be one more facet of Steve’s magic).

One crystal clear picture of Steve’s hand clasping Darren’s, their palms together, fingers entwined, pressed down into the sheets. Steve’s grip was so tight that it bordered on desperate, Steve was taller than Darren so at times certain position issues almost forced him to relinquish his hold but he never did and Darren had no intention of letting go of the one solid thing in his world.

Another of tears, hot and fast on his cheeks and salty when Darren’s tongue darted out to lick them off his lips. It hurt, not that Darren had never felt pain, an occupational hazard for a soccer player, but this was a deeper kind of hurt, one that was utter original and so he had no resistance mounted to combat it, no precursor he could weigh it against.

Steve didn’t apologize but the quick butterfly touch of lips to the back of Darren’s neck almost made up for it seeing as the pain eased slowly but surely anyway until it was more of a spectator than a forward constantly rushing his defenses.

And more still of garbled words, caresses both firm and fleeting, the light sheen of sweat on skin tanned by long hours outdoors, movements that were aborted and some that increased in pace with soft sounds of encouragement or protest, blunt nails digging into flesh and drawing raised welts.

This what Darren remembered and he is quite certain that he will never forget it. And if, on the off chance that he does, he is also quite certain that Steve would be more than happy to remind him.

~.~

Steve left some time later.

Darren limped his way over to his closet, shuffling with the kind of half step usually reserved for elderly persons or victims of violent crime. Despite the events of the past two hours, he was neither.

Deeply uncomfortable, yes.  More awkward than being dressed by his mother on picture day, also true, and embarrassed beyond anything he’d felt before but not truly traumatized or anything. None of those big words thrown around by newscasters in frighteningly bright colored suits seemed to exactly fit what he was feeling at the moment.

He swung the door open and observed his reflection in the full length mirror tacked to the back. Darren blinked at the stranger who had snuck into view when he wasn’t watching, did a small double take, and stared harder.

It was him, no doubt about it. Same hair although a little messed, a whole half sticking at odd angles. Same eyes, wide and a little shocky, glazed in the shadowy light. Same mouth, somewhat bruised, a bit swollen, and red. Same fingers running over his face in a delayed reaction to his appearance, verifying by touch when he at first doubted his sight. It was Darren. He was still that person.

Albeit a tad bit different on the outside. The inside too, now that he thought about it but that change was smaller and much less dramatic.

Darren felt like a pad of paper. An old pad, one carried by a student through years of schooling with bent edges and torn pages, a taped and broken spine, splashed with the remains of meals, perhaps dropped in the bath a time or two, but most of all, filled with thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams pinned to earth and held fast with simple black ink.

The letters were dark against his skin, shockingly out of place, and yet they fit perfectly somehow. At first, Darren thought it was just nonsense from the inside of Steve’s mind, a place he had yet to comprehend. He was reading backwards, his fingers brushing against each line, but the words he did pick out meant next to nothing to him.

 _Tu es á moi_ on his left shoulder. _Minahan_ on his right.

  _Sartzen dira didazu_ printed in a neat stripe across his collar.

And still more. All of it incomprehensible. It was the most impossible thing he’d ever seen. Two large letters, _Fy_ , in the middle of a triangle crafted from _Imi_ , _Důl_ , _Mea_ inside a circle of what looked like something straight out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, tasteful dots, swirls, half moon shapes and all. He found _Kolpania_ in a band around his upper arm and _Gruven_ on the inside of one wrist.

A sneaking suspicion began to form in Darren’s mind when his fingers dragged over _Mío_ , diagonally stretched over three of his ribs. He’d taken a single Spanish course for one semester at school and he hadn’t been all that good at it either. The complete extent of his skill allowed Darren to state his name, age and country of origin.

So yeah, he admitted it. Darren was crap at languages and he thought Steve (who had made no stones about how pointless he thought the class was) had been as well.  But then it wouldn’t be the first time Darren had underestimated Steve’s unique type of genius.

The suspicion solidified into certainty when he finally found it on the side of his hip. Darren had to twist in front of the mirror to see it, smudged from Steve’s bruising grip when they…well, did It. Smudged and a little blurry but still discernible, a very obvious:

 _MINE_.

It then occurred to Darren that he might be in a little bit over his head.

He snuck down the hall furtively, a rather pointless exercise considering his family wasn’t even home yet, probably wouldn’t be for a while, but it seemed natural to creep toward the bathroom, ducking into shadows as he went.

He looked worse when he got there. Maybe it was the overhead lighting or maybe it was the bigger mirror that his mother regularly wiped clear of fingerprints and smudges but somehow or another, Darren looked worse. The shadows under his eyes were darker. He looked like he’d just come out of the wrong side of a couple of consecutive soccer matches with the seniors. Which was, if he thought about it, not an entirely unapt comparison.

More words jumped out at him, none of them familiar but Darren knew what they meant all the same. He turned the shower on hot and waited while the water heated, running his fingers over each and every one of the words, slowly giving shape to foreign sounds as he went, tracing the lines of scripts he had no hope of pronouncing.

The water temperature rose to perfection before he finished. Darren clambered into the shower and reached for the soap. Steve had to use Sharpie, what a pain, his lips curled in a wry grin, of course, Steve was always a pain. Darren scrubbed at his skin with a washcloth and slowly but surely the water flowing down the drain turned dark gray as he washed away the most visible marks of what had transpired. It was still new, so odd, that he didn’t yet have a word for it.

But when Darren dried off and dressed, a very careful observer would notice faint lines crossing his exposed arms, lines that spelled so much more than the words they appeared to be. They were noticeable but…Darren found that he didn’t really…well, mind.

Besides, he was pretty good at art. Next time, maybe he’d draw a picture for Steve on his friend’s back, a veritable canvas, something intricate, something meaningful. You never could tell with these things, could you? Darren shrugged and smiled to himself, it might happen.

**Author's Note:**

> In order of appearance:  
> *I used Google translate so if there are any glaring errors that you notice, please tell me.  
> Tu es á moi – French – you are mine  
> Minahan – Filipino – mine  
> Sartzen dira didazu – Basque – You belong to me  
> Fy – Welsh – mine  
> Imi – Albanian – mine  
> Důl – Czech – mine  
> Mea – Latin – mine  
> Lord of the Rings – Bengali  
> Kolpania – Polish – mine  
> Gruven – Norwegian - mine  
> Mío – Spanish – mine 
> 
> ((Yes, in case it isn't obvious, Steve has Issues, capital I.))


End file.
